Gadgetory

hi I'm rich brown senior editor for cnet.com today we're gonna take a look at the HP Pavilion Elite Phoenix h9z this is HP's brand new mainstream gaming PC it comes in AMD and Intel based configurations the h9z model though is the AMD based one so this system has an AMD FX 1800 chip in it that's a native 8 core cpu comes in at 2.8 gigahertz it also has an nvidia geforce GT 550 graphics card it's sort of a mid-range card you can also see from the design in the system that HP is trying to communicate that this is in fact a gaming PC it's not really that innovative but it's not terrible either the problem though is that for 1049 this system is not as fast as other pcs we've seen for $9.99 and if you spend a couple hundred bucks more you can get significantly better performance even among other HP desktops the system is not as fast really making it kind of a disappointment behind this door here there's a typical SD card reader as well as some USB slots behind here you'll see the blu-ray player now it's kind of hard to tell but up here behind this little rise you've got two USB 3.0 Jack's as well as standard analog audio output now it might look a little spare back here in terms of connectivity but HP is actually covered in space is pretty well here's a graphics card it's got two DVI Jack's as well as a mini HDMI output here you've got 7.1 analog audio couple more USB ports as well as the all-important digital audio output and you'll of course notice the red LED here on this fan just like the one in the front all that says gaming so as you can see the inside of the Fenix is kind of a mess that's typical mainstream PCs but boutique vendors actually have systems in this price range that look very tidy inside so you can see that air cooled CPU down here now HP does actually sell a liquid cooling rig for this system and because this is an unlocked CPU if you bought that it's a $60 option you'd set it up and you'd be able to overclock this system now that's a pretty good feature we're used to seeing that in higher-end systems now overclocking would get you some more performance out of the CPU but you'd probably still be better off with an intel core i7 chip and you can actually get that in a phoenix from HP for a little more money and I'm here on the motherboard there's 8 gigs of ram in the room for two more sticks if you want to upgrade later behind this bar right here is the graphics and up here it's actually a nice beefy 600 watt power supply now we will say this for this system it actually has a pretty good range of expandability 600 Watts will let you add pretty much any high-end card at least within reason but for the foreseeable future so well we wouldn't really buy the system as an upgrade platform at least if you do you know there is some hope now up here there's actually two 1x PCI Express slots giving you some nice card expandability and here is HP's kind of perennial e terrible hard drive cage design problem is that makes it really hard to get the hard drives out you have to take out this whole assembly there's one drive installed already it's a terabyte drive and there's room to add a couple more if you want to so with the lightly stylized exterior and the red lights the system certainly does suggest that it is a gaming PC but overall its performance is pretty terrible for its price so we can't recommend it so I'm rich burnin this is the HP Pavilion Elite Phoenix h9z